Concept · Lead · UX · Code

BBot · Make your friends into Kidrobot art

I was approached by Thunderdog Studios' Tristan Eaton and JWT's Senior Art Director Peter Cortez to help them conceptualize and build an iPhone app based on Tristan's iconic illustrations. Tristan is the artist behind Kidrobot's Dunny and Munny, and he wanted to find a way to take his art and move it into the digital app world. BBot was the result of our collaboration.

The app lets you create digital cartoons of your friends and family based on a unique set of Tristan's illustrations, then set that image as the contact photo in your address book. In the end, when you get a call from your friends, you see this custom-made illustrative representation of them. It has this cute surprise moment when you see the image show up during a call.

Once we had the concept down, Tristan set to work making this incredible Adobe Illustrator file of all these unique layers for each part: sunglasses, cigars, bunny slippers, 3D glasses, hats, shirts, everything. It was HUGE and amazing to see the raw work of such a talented artist.

It was up to me to then rejigger all those layers to make them exportable and applicable to the our concept (read: nightmare) and figure out how to everything after that.

I built the app from the ground-up and spent many, many hours in that Illustrator file. It was a deceptively challenging project, and still one of my favorites.

The app features an array of bodies, body parts and accessories, more than 400 different items to allow customization of over a billion forms.